Weeks 35-41: Road to shippable!

Hello! It’s been about a month since my last update. I’ve been busy with some other things in life in the past few months, most importantly that my wife and I are going to have a baby! So at home I spend less time working on THE MISSION and more time with her, taking care of her and doing house stuff.

This development has also given me a nice way of focusing the time that I do have into what I think is most important in order to finish the game and get it out to all of you.

So I have made a prioritized list of things missing for THE MISSION to be shippable. I want to finish all the code work first – the more finalized the code is, the more actual bugs will reveal themselves (instead of odd behavior due to a development setup). Then I’ll move on to graphics, sound effects, and music, since those are unlikely to cause bugs.

The list:

Editor: Generate code for levels, create levels from code. This is a feature enabling player to share their custom levels with each other. Nearly done.

Bug: After leaving battle screen, gun charging sound still remains! I’ve tried to fix this a bunch of times but still it eludes me. Nemesis.

Title: Implement title art from Rezan, requires changes to title screen. Sizable art task since I have to trace the vector art into correct size pixel art.

Portraits: Rezan made awesome poses for the player characters! I want to update the in-game portraits to use them. Also requires tracing the vector art into correct size pixel art.

Palette: Find different reds for Foundry, it’s too saturated.

SFX: Molten metal death sound, for when player falls into molten metal in Foundry.

So this is what remains to be done for ME to consider THE MISSION a shippable game. After I finish the code work I’ll have more playtests to try to find any bugs. I’ll also have some usability testing for the level editor. And if you are interested in participating in that, please let me know!